A look at some of the season's most anticipated books. Plus, read a roundup of reviews from the Journal's Leisure & Arts editors

Noah Hawley’s FX series “Fargo” has earned him an Emmy and a Golden Globe and cemented his place in Hollywood as a creator and writer of critically acclaimed television. But his lifelong ambition, thus far unrealized, has been to break out as a novelist. With the release of his literary thriller “Before the Fall” on May 31, he’ll get another chance.

The novel begins with a plane crash in the Atlantic, exploring the past lives of each person on board to solve the mystery of why it went down.

Yaa Gyasi, 26, sold her debut novel, “Homegoing,” for at least $1 million last year.

The book begins with two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana. One marries a British officer and lives with him high in Cape Coast Castle. The other passes through the dungeon below. Sweeping across more than 250 years of history, the book follows the descendants of both sisters—one family in Ghana, the other in the U.S—devoting one chapter to a member of each generation.

International heartthrob Ignacio “Nacho” Figueras already has won over 50 polo championships and has modeled for Ralph Lauren for more than a decade. Now, he’s adding author to his resume. His new romance series, “The Polo Season,” follows a glamorous Argentine family living, playing and courting in the moneyed polo haven of Wellington, Fla. The first novel, “Nacho Figueras Presents: High Season,” will be released May 31, with two others to follow in June and July.

They’re steamy. They’re romantic. And they’re not really written by Mr. Figueras. Ghostwriter Jessica Whitman—the pseudonym for an anonymous writing team based in New York’s Hudson Valley—interviewed and observed Mr. Figueras and his wife, Delfina Blaquier, in the barn, on the field and around the social world of polo.

“High Season” features Alejandro Del Campo, the grieving widower captain of polo team La Victoria. When sweet, sheltered veterinarian Georgia Fellowes arrives in Wellington from New York, a fresh face in a sea of coiffed society types, Jandro is instantly entranced. The unlikely pair is plagued by missed opportunities, secret yearnings and unexpected interference from would-be lovers. In other words, a prototypical romance—set to a soundtrack of beating hoofs.

In 2011, Ms. El Rashidi was watching the Egyptian Revolution unfold in real time, covering the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in dispatches for the New York Review of Books. In her debut novel, the Cairo native charts her story around the Egyptian leader’s rise and fall. Ms. El Rashidi starts with her narrator as a six-year-old in 1984, sweltering in a home filled with worries about Mubarak. Her father warns about “the making of a Pharaoh.” Told over three summers, the tale returns to her in 1998 as a politically aware college filmmaker and in 2014 as an adult making sense of her past.

Ms. Cline’s debut made news two years ago amid reports that Random House snagged the manuscript for seven figures in a three-book deal. Set in sex-and-drug-fueled 1960s northern California, the novel follows narrator Evie Boyd and a group of otherworldly girls under the spell of a Charles Manson-like cult leader named Russell. To the girls, he is “The Wizard” who receives messages from animals and heals people with his hands. He mesmerizes Evie, who observes that “his voice seemed to slide all over me, to saturate the air, so that I felt pinned in place.” But he is not what he seems. Even his sideburns aren’t real.

Josie, a dentist, is numbed by a shot of existential Novocain when she heads to Alaska with her two children at the start of Dave Eggers’s latest novel. The heroine is running from a past that includes a breakup, a lawsuit that ends her dental practice, the haunting death of a young man​ and a fog of overall detachment (she can’t even feel her face for a time). Early on, Mr. Eggers asks of his heroine: “But could she really be reborn in a land of mountains and light? It was a long shot.” Along roads dotted by warning signs for wild animals, Josie takes her kids north in an RV, dodging police, wildfires and other hazards.

In a family with a special-needs child, what happens to the “normal” sibling? The question hangs in the background of this novel. Iris is little sister to Tilly, a volatile autistic girl. (“‘Zero to sixty,’ is what my mom calls it,” Ms. Parkhurst writes of the child’s emotional state in the book narrated alternately by Iris and her mother, Alexandra.) Out of ideas to fix Tilly’s problems, the family moves to Camp Harmony, a New Hampshire parenting retreat run by a child-behavior expert named Scott Bean—a slick-haired group-hugger who seems a little off. Ms. Parkhurst writes about autism from experience, as the parent of a child with Asperger’s syndrome.

And now for a book that belongs in the pantheon of SAT anxiety dreams. The novel from Latin America’s latest literary star takes the form of a standardized test, based on a Chilean college entrance exam. Though most of the book’s questions and answers are logical, some are absurd. A sample nonsensical question from the book, which is translated from the original Spanish: “If someone strikes you on the right _____ , offer him the other as well.” (Choose from: cheek, week, wing, chord or time.) The longest passages appear in the form of reading-comprehension tests at the end.

Steady that cup of Earl Grey, Julian Fellowes fans: The creator of television’s “Downton Abbey” has written a book that shares plenty of DNA with his soapy period drama. The novel, set in the tony Belgravia neighborhood of 19th-century London, features some familiar types: officious ladies, nosy servants, scandalous cads, questionable heirs and even a high-class dog. “Downton” had the yellow lab Isis; now it’s a dachshund named Agnes. Grand Central Publishing is releasing a digital chapter a week leading up to the book’s launch, allowing the story to unfold episodically, a little like a PBS miniseries.

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “The Shipping News” and “Brokeback Mountain” spent nearly a decade writing her latest novel, an epic spanning more than 700 pages and 320 years of history. It opens in 1693 in New France—in what is now the Canadian province of Quebec—as two young men arrive from France to work as indentured woodcutters. The book follows the men’s descendants around the world as they exploit the forest, and grapple with the ecological consequences.

Lucia Stanton’s prized possession is a Zippo lighter left by her dead father. Fire is a class equalizer, says the misfit heroine, who seeks out the fabled Arson Club in her new high school where rich classmates reign. The teenager, whose mother is in a mental institution, makes the school psychologist cry but finds tenderness in an aunt who believes in her. Pantheon senior editor Jennifer Jackson said before Mr. Ball writes he thinks for several weeks, not even picking up a pen: “Then he spools it out on the page, calls me up and says, ‘I’m finished and I think you’ll like it.’”

Best friends—one rich, the other pretty—navigate life in their 30s. Mr. Alam took bits and pieces from his friendships with women to craft well-heeled Sarah, beautiful Lauren and their complex relationship. Early reviews praise “Rich and Pretty,” Mr. Alam’s debut, for its believable female characters. “A lot of it was observed from the front lines,” the author said.

It’s Brooklyn in the 1970s, and August is living without her mother, “lifting my hand to stroke my own cheek” for comfort and finding companionship with three friends. The girls experience the emotional chaos of growing up in this story narrated in flashbacks by an adult August. Ms. Woodson, a young-adult novelist who wrote her 2014 National Book Award-winning memoir “Brown Girl Dreaming” in verse, delivers her first adult novel in 20 years. “It’s going to be one of our very big fiction titles for the summer,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher and senior vice president at HarperCollins Publishers.

Subtitled ‘The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet,’ Daisy Dunn’s ‘Catullus’ Bedspread’ was published in the U.K. earlier this year to rave reviews. Catullus is still read mostly for his love poems, which have spiced up many a high-school Latin class, but he also was known for mocking political figures of the day, including Julius Caesar. Ms. Dunn, who describes some of Catullus’s poems as “goatish,” says she discovered her subject’s poems when she was 17. The lines were “as if we hear them with Catullus’s quickening heartbeat,” she writes. “they made Catullus feel more alive to me than any other poet I knew.” Now, though she’s read them hundreds of times, “they still have the same effect.”

Journalist Emily Voigt dives into the obsessive, high-stakes market for the Asian arowana, or dragon fish, an exotic pet that has commanded prices as high as $300,000 (for rare, farmed albinos) and has spurred at least one murder. More than a million have been bred in captivity, including pricey albinos, but the fish is endangered in the wild. Ms. Voigt’s quest to see a wild one—with the help of Heiko Bleher, “the Indiana Jones of the tropical fish industry”—leads her to Borneo, Myanmar and the Colombian Amazon.

In 1993, 26-year-old American Amy Biehl was stoned and stabbed to death by a mob in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents, in an act of reconciliation that drew feel-good attention in postapartheid South Africa, hired two of their daughter’s murderers to work for their family foundation. Nearly 20 years after her death, Ms. van der Leun begins to question the widely accepted story of this crime and the subsequent reconciliation.

Tudor scholar John Guy, author of “Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart,” gives Queen Elizabeth I’s final years some extra attention. Crowned at 25, the ‘Virgin Queen’ ruled for more than four decades, yet most historians have tended to focus on her ascension and early adventures. Using primary documents, from state papers and unpublished letters to large parchment rolls, Mr. Guy makes the case that the queen truly came into her own after the age of 50.

The story behind Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel, "The Sun Also Rises,' involves the “Lost Generation” and the trip to Pamplona that serve as the basis to the book. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contributions to the book, which put Hemingway on the map, were extensive. It also shows how delicately editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s had to handle the manuscript, with its four-letter words, drinking and philandering. Publisher Charles Scribner pronounced it “vulgar.”

In Bill Broun’s novel “Night of the Animals” (Ecco, July 5), set in 2052, a 90-year-old man who believes he can understand the language of animals undertakes a jailbreak operation at the London Zoo. The goal: to save its inhabitants from a suicide cult set on exterminating all animals on Earth.

In Max Porter’s short, moving novel, “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers” (Graywolf Press, June 7), a man and his two young sons, mourning the death of their wife and mother, are visited by a giant crow who speaks in nonsense verse.

Charles Foster lives like a badger and other creatures—eating earthworms, sleeping underground and catching fish with his mouth—in “Being a Beast” (Metropolitan Books, June 21), a blend of memoir, neuroscience and nature writing.

Young-adult author Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults, “Jonathan Unleashed” (Viking, July 5), is a comedy in which two dogs—a spaniel named Sissy and a border collie named Dante—come to the aid of a 20-something New Yorker staring down adulthood.

Ina Yalof interviews the creative minds behind some of New York’s most celebrated cuisine for “Food and the City” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, May 31). Ghaya Oliveira recounts her rise from kitchen cleaner to executive pastry chef at Daniel, and the founders of Levain Bakery share their path to concocting the city’s most-coveted cookie.

Tess moves to New York in search of a richer existence and finds herself entangled in the sensual pleasures—and purveyors—of the restaurant world. Stephanie Danler’s anticipated debut, “Sweetbitter” (Alfred A. Knopf, May 24), bursts with gastronomic detail informed by her own front-of-house experiences in Manhattan.

Three former college bandmates, now Brooklyn neighbors, face midlife and their children’s coming-of-age in Emma Straub’s buzzy “Modern Lovers” (Riverhead, May 31). Struggling wives Zoe and Jane have two babies: Ruby, their teenage daughter, and Hyacinth, their restaurant, where Jane runs the kitchen and finds her respite.

A flambé gone awry has pastry chef Livvy Rawlings running from her job at a Boston dinner club for the simple life in small-town Vermont. There, her culinary skills draw her into the world of the Sugar Maple Inn and a high-stakes pie contest in Louise Miller’s cozy debut, “The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living” (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, Aug. 9).

Isabel Vincent remembers “Dinner with Edward” (Algonquin Books, May 24), the nonagenarian widower who invited her into his home for weekly meals and uncommon companionship. The chapters are marked by Edward’s menus, from buttery sirloin steaks and chocolate soufflé to oysters Rockefeller and tarte au citron.

Italian chef Marcella Hazan breaks down the basics in “Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market” (Scribner, July 12). Ms. Hazan died in 2013, leaving behind an unfinished guide to ingredients, now completed by her husband, Victor Hazan.

Photography meets data visualization in “PhotoViz.” Edited by Nicholas Felton, the book showcases photographs that bring more than a single moment to an image, like the flight patterns of birds and the movements of a woman over six hours of sleep.

Did Herman Melville write “Moby-Dick” because he was driven by a passion for Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated the novel? In “The Whale: A Love Story,” by novelist Mark Beauregard, desire for Hawthorne, a neighbor, sparks the midcentury creative fervor that produced Melville’s maritime saga.

Was Herman Melville’s whale-hunting epic "Moby Dick" inspired by a love affair with his neighbor’s wife? In “Melville in Love,” biographer Michael Shelden proposes a new muse for what many consider the great American novel: Sarah Morewood, who lived a stone’s throw from Melville in Pittsfield, Mass.